Event Announcement: Rediscover Discovery III: Updates to Discovery

This Friday August 19th, attend the Library’s third Rediscover Discovery session!
The session is aimed providing updates on our major discovery interfaces to public services, instruction, and information desk staff  so that they can incorporate the most current information on our discovery systems into their instruction sessions in the coming semester.  This session will cover recent updates to features and functionality for:
  • Articles+
  • Quicksearch
  • Digital Collections (FindIt)
We will also share the some of the upcoming changes in store for these discovery systems as well.
Join us on Friday August 19th, from 2:30-3:30pm in Bass L01 A&B for our third Rediscover Discovery event.  Sign up to attend the event in Bass in person here: http://schedule.yale.edu/event.php?id=1146001
Alternatively, you can watch live online at http://greet.yale.edu/rediscodisco. The event recording will also be distributed after the session is over.
See you there!
~Jenn Nolte

LIT and partners Tech Talk | Wednesday July 20th 2016

On Wednesday July 20th, from 3pm-4pm in Bass L01, join Library IT and partners in our monthly discussion of tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.

Our agenda includes:

  • Avalon for Music Library (Cindy Greenspun and Jonathan Manton)
  • Desktop video conferencing pilot (Beatrice Richardson)
  • Quicksearch enhancements, integrations, upgrades (Kalee Sprague)
  • LIT service overview documentation (Ray Frohlich)

For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Adobe Connect:

http://greet.yale.edu/littechtalk/ [sign in as a guest]

Slides and recordings of the Tech Talk sessions will be archived in https://yale.box.com/LITTechTalkArchives 

See you there!

Service Disruptions: Special Collections management, Findit sign on and more

UPDATE: The service disruptions, which ended up being campus-wide, have been resolved. Thank you for your patience as Library IT and Yale ITS worked to diagnose and resolve these issues!


 

We are experiencing some disruptions related to authentication in the following services:

Special Collections at Yale (Beinecke and MSSA Aeon queues)
FindIt (Digital Collections search)
BorrowDirect sign-on
ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan)
Campuspress (Yale blogging platform)
Box
E-resource authentication pages

Other applications that may be using the Shibboleth authentication service

Library IT is aware of the issue and is looking into the cause. We will keep you updated on the status of these services and let you know when they are restored.

 

Until then, Library IT staff will also provide status updates to this list as necessary.  You can also monitor status availability in real time here:

 

 

Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

 

-Library IT Staff

 

http://library.yale.edu/lit

Findit Digital Collections now in Quicksearch

The Quicksearch Implementation team  and Library IT are happy to announce that collections from the Findit digital repository are now available in Quicksearch!

You can view digital collections in Quicksearch by going to the library front door at http://web.library.yale.edu, or directly to the Quicksearch main page at http://search.library.yale.edu, and searching for a term like “Andy Warhol”.

Three result bento boxes now display, Books+, Articles+, and Digital Collections.

Clicking on the “See xxx results” link in the Digital Collections bento box, or the “Digital Collections” facet in the left hand menu, will bring you to the full Digital Collections page.  The Digital Collections page provides facets that match the facet functionality in Findit.  Clicking on a title link will bring you into the Findit interface.

 

Service interruption for several library systems – possibly network related

UPDATE:

You may have seen an email from Len Peters just now, reporting that the campus network issues are resolved. Library IT can confirm that some Library services are still experiencing a disruption. This includes but is not necessarily limited to Orbis and Findit. Now that email is working more reliably, we will notify Yulib with updates as we receive them.

 

A note: when campus email services are disrupted, Library IT will continue to communicate service updates on our blog (campuspress.yale.edu/libraryitnews), our Twitter account (@yalelibraryIT) and in some instances, with a notice on the library front door (library.yale.edu). Please check these places for updates if email is not working or slow.

 

You can also check systems statuses at the Library here: http://status.library.yale.edu/

 

and at central ITS here: http://its.yale.edu/system-status

 

Thank you for your patience and for reporting all the outages!

 

ORIGINAL POST:

Several Yale Library services, as well as some campus-wide services, have been interrupted since yesterday afternoon. ITS is investigating these issues. It is possible that campus network problems may be the root cause.

Some of the affected services include but are not limited to:

  • email, including mailman listservs and alias emails
  • Voyager/Orbis
  • Findit

Library IT is actively monitoring this situation and will supply updates as we receive them. ITS has informed Library IT that a Yale alert will go out about these issues shortly. Please check this site, as well as the LIT Twitter account (@yalelibraryIT) for more updates. There will also be a notice posted to the front door.

Thank you for your patience as ITS works to resolve this issue.

Service interruption for BorrowDirect, Sharepoint and more

UPDATED:

Library IT is pleased to report that BorrowDirect access is returning for users on and off campus, but the change may take effect over several hours. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with BorrowDirect tonight or over the weekend. Additional updates:

•         SharePoint (collaborate.library.yale.edu) will be unavailable over the weekend. Library IT will update again on Monday with more information on SharePoint. A big thank you goes out to our SharePoint stakeholders who got in touch with us; your input was extremely helpful. At this time, Library staff do not need to take any actions with SharePoint.

•         LIT will address other smaller systems and services living on this server after SharePoint has been restored properly.

Please let us know if you have questions or concerns- we again thank you for your patience as we resolve this issue.

To report problems or ask a question about this or any of our other services, please fill out a problem report, or send email to libraryit@yale.edu.

UPDATED:

Thank you very much for your continued patience as we work to address the issues regarding resources.library.yale.edu and collaborate.library.yale.edu.

Library IT has assessed the impact to library services and systems and come up with a plan to maintain or restore those services after this server goes offline:

1)    BorrowDirect:
Our first priority is to maintain access to Borrow Direct.

2)    SharePoint:
Following that, we are working to ensure continued access to SharePoint. Cindy Greenspun will be reaching out to major SharePoint stakeholders; please get in touch with her ASAP if your department uses SharePoint as a part of its daily work.

3)    LIT will address other smaller systems and services living on this server after these two major services are restored properly.

Once again, if a service or system you use is accessible through a URL that starts with http://resources.library.yale.edu or http://collaborate.library.yale.edu, it is safe to assume it will be unavailable. Please email libraryit@yale.edu to confirm if you are unsure.

ORIGINAL POST:

There has recently been a security issue on one of our servers (resources.library.yale.edu) that will result in Central ITS taking it offline sometime today. This means that the following two major services will be unavailable:

BorrowDirect (resources.library.yale.edu/cas/borrowdirect.aspx)

Sharepoint (collaborate.library.yale.edu)

Additionally, many smaller services and systems hosted on resources.library.yale.edu will also be unavailable. If a service or system you use is accessible through a URL that starts with http://resources.library.yale.edu, it is safe to assume it will be unavailable. Please email libraryit@yale.edu to confirm if you are unsure.

 

We do not yet have an estimate on when services will be restored. Library IT will follow up with an estimate as soon as possible.

 

Yale ITS Moving Drupal to the Cloud

On Tuesday, February 16, Yale ITS created a test instance of the Library’s Drupal website in the new Acquia cloud environment.  Library IT will have two months to test the site’s content, performance, and robustness.  If all the tests go well, the Library’s Drupal website will move to the Acquia cloud at the end of the test period.

The Acquia cloud is a new cloud-based computing platform that Yale ITS is using to relieve some of its dependence on locally-hosted architecture.  Yale ITS has told Library IT that the Acquia-hosted Drupal site will be faster, more responsive, and more robust than the current locally-hosted Drupal site.

Service Outage this Saturday 2/20

There will be a service outage this Saturday February 20th at 10am for approximately 2 hours. This outage is necessary to do perform routine maintenance on one of our servers. During the outage, the following services will be affected:

 

 

BorrowDirect (resources.library.yale.edu/cas/borrowdirect.aspx)

Ductus  (resources.library.yale.edu/ductus/)

VRC Finding Aids (resources.library.yale.edu/VRCFindingAids/)

The World War I Experience    (resources.library.yale.edu/WWI/)

YUL Staff Directory (resources.library.yale.edu/StaffDirectory/)

 

Library IT will send another reminder on Saturday morning at 9am. We will also send an “all clear” when the services have been restored successfully.

 

To report problems or ask a question about this or any of our other services, please fill out a problem report, or send email to libraryit@yale.edu.

 

Thanks as always, for your patience and cooperation!

Update: Service Disruption Notification

Library IT trialled a fully automated disruption notification service from December 2014 through February 2015. Shortly thereafter we asked staff to participate in a short survey to evaluate the trial and found that the majority of survey respondents indicated a desire to see the service continue as an opt-in offering.

For those that provided feedback we thank you very much for your participation and helpful comments. We are pleased to announce that the disruption notification opt-in service is now available to all. Please take a moment and join the new opt-in mailing list at the following address: http://web.library.yale.edu/lit/email-alerts

If you are a supervisor or department head interested in registering your entire group, or you would like to recommend the monitoring of other public services, please coordinate with Cindy Greenspun (cindy.greenspun@yale.edu) in Library IT.  Please route all other questions or comments to Ray Frohlich (raymond.frohlich@yale.edu).

Two Buildings, One Workflow – Multi-Site Delivery for Beinecke Materials

The Beinecke library’s major renovation will impact all areas of service as the historic building is shuttered between May 2015 and September 2016. Both patrons and staff depend on reliable access to the unparalleled rare materials collection, and therefore need a reliable requesting mechanism to get offsite materials delivered to either the temporary public reading room (located in SML) or the new Beinecke Technical Services space at Science Park.

Special collections stored at the LSF have historically only been deliverable to the owning collection – further movement is handled by the collection’s staff. Changing this to allow for two formal delivery locations required a change to Aeon, the software used by special collections to manage requesting, and to the scripts used by the LSF to process incoming requests. Working with Beinecke and LSF Staff, Enterprise Systems and Services personnel were able to identify an unused field in the Aeon application and use it to store the desired pickup location. The Aeon and GFA applications responsible for integration were then modified to recognize this field and use it to represent a new “drop code” for Beinecke materials. Staff can now populate this field from a radio button in the web request form or through direct entry in the staff client – no other changes to the request are necessary.

Patron requests are automatically designated for the public reading room without staff intervention. With the first test requests processed successfully, Beinecke’s staff at the new technical services headquarters will be ready to continue work uninterrupted after their move. This solution also opens the door to requesting across special collections – allowing readers to view materials at the reading room most convenient for them. While there are many policy, safety, and preservation concerns to be addressed, this project has helped to ensure continuity of service for Beinecke patrons while opening the discussion for more convenient material access for special collection patrons in general.